Lifeguard - James Patterson [9]
I hugged the side of the house and came across a regular framed door I assumed led to the kitchen. I looked inside, no light.
I wrapped my hand in a cloth I was carrying and punched through a glass panel in the door. Shit . . . No sound.
I glanced at my watch. Mickey and the guys were ready to go in.
I reached inside the door and twisted the knob and let myself in. Jeez, Louise. I was in some kind of pantry, leading toward the rear of the house. I saw a sunroom overlooking the lawn. Next to it was a dining room. High ceilings, tapestries on the walls. A couple of candelabra that looked as if they might have belonged to the Romanovs.
God, am I crazy doing this? I knew the place was wired. Clearly the owners or the staff hadn’t put on the alarm. I was thinking I could search along the windows for the contact points. 8:10. The crew would be going in at any moment. I had to get this done. My heart was racing.
Suddenly I heard footsteps and I froze. A black woman in a white robe shuffled toward the kitchen. Must be the maid. She looked up and saw me, and I could see by the little gag in her throat, she was more scared than I was.
She didn’t scream, her jaw just dropped. My face was hidden under the cap. There was nothing she could identify about me. I just stood there for a second and muttered, “Sorry, ma’am.” Then I bolted for the door.
I figured that in two seconds she would be on the phone to the police. That was as good as an alarm.
I ran back through the hedges and hugged the shadows to Ocean Boulevard. I jumped in the Bonneville, slammed it into in gear, and drove away at a reasonable speed. I looked back. Everything was dark. No one had come out to get a look at my plates. It was 8:15. Cops were probably crisscrossing all over town, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
“You’re goddamn crazy, Ned Kelly!” I shouted at the top of my lungs.
Three house alarms in record time!
I hit the accelerator and felt the night sea breeze whip my hair. I was alongside the ocean and the moon was lighting it up and I felt an incredible thrill buzzing through my veins. I thought about Tess. How it could be with her. How I’d been marking time down there for a long time, and now I’d made the perfect score.
Chapter 10
SOMETHING DIDN’T FEEL RIGHT. Mickey sensed it as soon as they stepped through the front gates.
He had an inner feeling about these things.
The house was there in front of them. Spectacular, vast. Lit up like this great Italian palace. Pointed Venetian arches and windows with stone balconies. An arched loggia, ringed with bougainvillea, leading around to the sea. The driveway was probably a hundred yards long, every bush and tree perfectly lit. He heard the crunch of pebbles under their heels. They were in stolen police uniforms. Even if someone was around, no one would suspect a thing. Everything was just the way he was told it’d be.
And still he had this bad feeling in his gut.
He looked at Bobby and Barney. He could see they were nervous, too. He knew them well enough to know what they were thinking.
Never been so close to anything this grand.
Casa Del Océano. Ocean House.
Mickey knew everything about the place. He had studied it. Knew it was built by someone named Addison Mizner in 1923. He knew the interior layout, the alarms. How to get in, where the paintings were.
So why did he feel nervous? C’mon, he thought, to calm himself, there’s five million bucks inside.
“So what the hell is that?” Barney nudged him with the black satchel containing his tools. At the end of the long pebbled driveway, there was this huge, lit-up marble . . . bowl.
“Birdbath,” Mickey answered, and grinned.
“Birdbath?” Barney shrugged and adjusted the brim of his police cap. “More like a fucking pterodactyl!”
Mickey’s watch read 8:15. Dee had called in; Ned, as expected, had done his job. Cop cars were probably bouncing all over town right now. He knew there were cameras hidden in the trees, so they kept their faces hidden under their caps. In front of the